State Capacity, Incumbent Turnover and Democratic Change in Authoritarian Elections

State Capacity and the Environmental Investment Gap in Authoritarian States

Punctuated Equilibrium in Public Budgeting in Authoritarian and Democratic Brazil

We explore punctuated equilibrium in public budgets with a focus on Brazil before and after its transition to democracy. Empirical evidence in this area has largely been limited to western democracies, but the differences between authoritarian and democratic regime types suggest important research questions. Our data on Brazil suggest a modest shift from higher to lower kurtosis in budget distr...

Disasters and Incumbent Electoral Fortunes: No Implications for Democratic Competence∗

A recent empirical literature shows that incumbent electoral fortunes suffer following negative events incumbents cannot control. These results have been taken to show that voters are insufficiently rational to competently hold elected officials accountable. Without disputing the empirical findings, we dispute these interpretations. Our argument has two steps. First, we present a formal model t...

Preliminary draft Authoritarian elections and leadership succession , 1975 - 2000

Authoritarian elections and leadership succession, 1975-2000 Why do a substantial number of non-democratic regimes hold elections? In this paper, I exposit a model in which authoritarian rulers agree to positive levels of electoral risk primarily to reduce the threat of their violent removal from office via a coup d’etat or revolution, or to lower the cost of managing that risk through secret p...

Democratic Elections in Faulty Distributed Systems

In this paper, we show that for elections in distributed systems the conversion from non-binary choices to binary choices does not always provide optimal results when the preferences of nodes are not identical. With this observation, we study the problem of conducting democratic elections in distributed systems in the form of social choice and social welfare functions with three or more candida...